News

Making the Hunger Games’ Mockingjay

04/04/2012

Like the Twilight and Harry Potter phenomena, the teen adventure film The Hunger Games has
become more than a big blockbuster success. Set in a dystopian world where teenagers must fight
to the death in televised combat, the movie has so far raked in a whopping $248.5
million. Its opening weekend – the third-best in North American box office
history – saw millions of moviegoers queued up for midnight screenings at
megaplexes nationwide.

Interestingly, Dana
Schneider 82 SC was not one of them. The Ohio-based jewelry
designer, who has made work for more than 50 TV shows and films like The Matrix sequels and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, painstakingly
designed the mockingjay pin worn by actress Jennifer Lawrence for her lead role as Katniss Everdeen. But in an
interview this week with the website Lark Crafts, the artist admits she has
yet to see the film.

Given her day-to-day work schedule, it’s clear
why Schneider may not actually have enough time to take in a movie – even one in
which her signature sterling silver and gold pin appears much larger than life on a giant screen.

“I’ve made sacrifices others wouldn’t choose to make in
their lives or their careers,” says Schneider, who also makes custom pieces for
music industry celebrities like Marilyn Manson, Cher and Snoop Dogg. “I can tell you a lot of jewelers wouldn’t want to do
this even if they could. Some years I might design 180 different pieces. I pull
all-nighters, work 24 hours, get on a plane, fly to LA, go to the set... and then I get to sleep. But I love it.”

When she was asked to create the mockingjay pin, Schneider had
already been working in Hollywood for over a decade. But the pin posed a unique
challenge: the design had already been established – and prominently featured on the
cover of the originalnovel by Suzanne Collins.

“It was
an incredible challenge to replicate something that’s so clear in the minds of
so many fans,” she says in the interview. “Getting it right involved months of
meetings, models and plane trips.… It took a while to get that aged look right.
And it took six different models to work out things such as where to solder the
arrow on the pin and how to make it look delicate and yet have it still be
functional.”

These days, Schneider is highly sought after for her
dramatic, cutting-edge designs. But her path to jewelry design actually began
with science: Her father, an engineer, taught her how to cast, solder and use
basic tools like pliers. As a Sculpture major at RISD, she worked with heavy
forged steel, cast bronze and aluminum. And it wasn’t until 15 years later – while at the movies – that she actually got inspired to design for the big screen.

“I was watching a trailer for The Matrix in 1998 and thought, ‘I can do that,’” Schneider says. “I
moved to Los Angeles and a year later, with a lot of hard work and a lot of determination,
my jewelry was appearing in films.”